Trump and DeSantis Angle for Hard-Right Parents at Moms for Liberty Summit

Former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis rarely cross paths on the campaign trail, but on Friday they each addressed the same crowd in a bid to court hardcore conservatives. Appearing before the newest powerhouse in right-wing politics, their speeches reflected their competing strategies to win over the GOP’s fundamentalist faction, with DeSantis promising a more competent brand of governance that can better advance a far-right agenda, and Trump boasting how his Supreme Court picks were delivering some of the conservative movement’s most significant policy wins.

The two converged at a summit for Moms for Liberty, which started as a fringe group three years ago but has quickly morphed into a dominant force in the GOP, as parental rights has emerged as a frontline issue for the party’s base. The organization now has more than 100,000 members in 45 states, making the confab an early cattle call for candidates vying for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
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Without mentioning Trump’s name, DeSantis took a not-so-subtle swipe at his chief rival. “2024 is the time to put up or shut up,” he told the crowd. “No more excuses about why we can’t win against the left. No more excuses about why you didn’t do what you said you would do.” In that vein, DeSantis trumpeted his record as Florida governor as proof of concept for his efficacy as a chief executive: enacting the so-called Don’t Say Gay law that forbids the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, restricting the way public schools can teach racial issues, and prohibiting children’s access to gender transition treatments.

Without mentioning DeSantis’s name, Trump struck back at the insinuation in his remarks hours later. The former President basked in the glory of Supreme Court rulings this week that curtailed affirmative action in college admissions, struck down President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, and allowed a Colorado graphic designer to refuse service to same-sex couples planning to marry. “Many presidents never get the opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice. I had three. They are gold,” he said, referring to Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. “Maybe we’ll get three or four more. Can you imagine?”

Trump also made an unusual plea for a Republican candidate in front of a hard-right audience: Don’t alienate too many voters with extreme rhetoric on abortion.

While taking credit for the Supreme Court decision last year that ended a constitutional right to the procedure by overturning Roe v. Wade, Trump suggested that overly restrictive proposals could be costly to Republicans in the upcoming elections. “By getting rid of Roe v Wade, we’ve given tremendous negotiating power to the pro-lifers,” Trump said. “They didn’t have any negotiating power at all. So this was an amazing thing. But the Republicans are gonna have to learn how to speak on the subject. Because if they don’t, maybe they’re not going to get the kind of votes they should get.”

In January, Trump said on social media that abortion cost the GOP gains in the 2022 midterms, especially those Republicans who opposed exceptions for rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is at risk. It’s a position that creates a contrast to DeSantis, who signed a six-week abortion ban into law in April that Trump has called “harsh.” In response, DeSantis has accused Trump of going “too soft” on abortion.

The two candidates’ appearance at the Moms for Liberty gathering was not without controversy. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled the group an anti-government extremist group that spreads anti-LGBTQ misinformation and vitriol. The summit sparked a backlash, with more than 100 protesters outside the Philadelphia venue, according to the Associated Press, as demonstrators chanted “Not in our city” and “Let’s say gay.”

Trump and DeSantis were not the only GOP presidential hopefuls to address the confab. Nikki Haley, a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, also spoke on Friday, and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy are scheduled to speak there on Saturday.

The latest polling has Trump as the clear frontrunner, with a 38 percent lead nationally over DeSantis, his closest competitor for the GOP nomination.

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American Health Care Faces a Staffing Crisis And Its Affecting Care

Hospitals, urgent care facilities, clinics, and imaging centers throughout the United States are experiencing staffing issues. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, costs have reached new highs as institutions are forced to staff their facilities with temporary health professionals due to rising turnover, fluctuations in demand, and evolving appreciations for work-life balance. These temporary, or “locums,” physicians, mid-level administrators, travel nurses, therapists, and technicians are paid many multiples more than regular staff. Frequently, existing long-term employees feel undervalued in relation to these temporary workers and some resign to join the rapidly expanding pool of locums healthcare workers while others seek out early retirement.
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This burgeoning crisis has greatly affected the bottom line of healthcare facilities, with many of the country’s leading hospital centers posting massive losses. Institutions were already operating at the margins prior to 2020, but the pandemic only increased demands from facilities while also producing skyrocketing expenses. Even more detrimental to the public is the closing of smaller hospitals and community-based clinics, especially in rural and underserved areas. These centers had even less financial buffer to survive through financial hardship. This trend has created health care deserts, significantly impacting maternal care and emergency medicine, among other critical areas of patient care.

This staffing crisis is leading to ongoing delays related to boarding in emergency departments, prolonged admission to hospitals, and delayed elective and emergent surgeries. Each of these contributes to adverse outcomes, morbidity, and mortality. Accordingly, quality of care is affected. Over the last few years, there has been a rise in medical errors. The Joint Commission, a major agency that monitors hospitals and health facilities, reported a 19% rise in adverse events in 2022. After several decades of creating a safety culture in health care, this is a chilling statistic. Staffing with temporary workers may play a significant and expanding role in this negative trend. Logically, temporary workers may lack an intrinsic team dynamic or familiarity with institutional resources and quality assurance practices, allowing mistakes to fall through the cracks. Several decades of developing team-based approaches, where roles are clearly defined and providers are familiar with protocols and optimal approaches for specific disease entities, are now at threat. Moreover, burnout is known to increase medical errors, and the pandemic has only worsened provider well-being via increased time at work and emotional stress.

Read More: The Coming Collapse of the Health Care System

Health care administrators were ill-prepared to deal with a lack of full-time staff and have yet to find a solution, even though we are three years removed from the pandemic’s onset. Each spring, new graduates from professional programs typically join hospitals. This is not the case post-pandemic, as many health professionals now join staffing agencies which provide various institutions with contract-based temporary work. New staff receive financial rewards of increased pay, flexibility that improves work-life balance, and many other perks such as housing and travel support. We have watched as health care consultants try to encourage facilities to answer staffing needs with colorful posters, virtual nursing tools, gig economy processes, and other ideas. These may work in other industries, but health care requires special considerations as facilities lack the same profitability and providers face risks from direct patient contact. So how can the healthcare leaders address staffing issues and provide excellent care? We propose several simple ideas that require no consultants and are based on common sense.

Raise salaries by ten to twenty percent. Inflation has decayed the value of earned dollars over the last few years. In particular, physicians earn significantly less than they did earlier this century when adjusted for inflation. Similarly, nurses feel that their salaries have not kept up with their rising educational demands and work hour requirements. Resident physicians at several hospitals have considered unionization to combat the rising time demands, subpar benefits and parental leave protections, and inadequate financial compensation. When equated for hours worked, resident physicians, who have completed over eight years of higher education, earn under $25 per hour and often struggle to make ends meet. Employees are less likely to leave a facility and more likely to improve the quality of their work if they feel valued by the management. Why reward locums with several multiples of hourly wage when you can develop a loyal workforce?

Provide in-house 24/7 child care staff. Many individuals entering health care are young individuals who may be starting families. Yet many providers are forced to work well over 40 hours per week. Quality child care is a great perk, both financially and emotionally for staff. Staff will appreciate onsite care that is safe for their children. It also has the benefit that parents can visit children during breaks. This easy cost-effective idea will be a major recruitment magnet and retention tool which can concurrently fight burnout.

Flexible scheduling. Particularly applicable to medical residency programs, couples may take advantage of flex scheduling to align shifts and increasing quality personal time. Nurses and other staff may also appreciate flex scheduling as it will help improve their workflow and maximize efficiency. Early retirees may return for part-time employment if they can develop schedules that complement their lifestyle. As we face significant impending shortages across health professions, this can offer a valuable stopgap. Data has shown that staff perform better and report improved mental health when they have time to cope with the many challenges inherent to health care. Allowing health care workers to work on their own terms may be a major way to address burnout and improve patient outcomes while recovering much of the staff that we have lost in recent years.

Re-engineer the electronic medical record. Reducing the amount of time providers spend on screen time can optimize efficiency and reduce mental health detriments. Working with patients is typically the primary motivation behind individuals’ entry into the health professions. Many providers report feeling like data entry clerks with diminishing human connection to patients. Moreover, they are often forced to spend their few evening hours at home completing patient charting responsibilities instead of being present with family. Daily routine tasks on the electronic medical record must be decreased or rerouted to other specialized staff who can optimize the physician’s time. This can save money for institutions and allow providers to see more patients while also feeling more fulfilled.

Invest in provider support. Administrators may increase hiring of advanced practice providers, medical scribes, and support staff so that each employee may focus on their skillset, hence improving efficiency and outcomes for the whole team. Physicians, APPs, and nurses each report improved work satisfaction when relevant support staff are present. Moreover, this investment by administration can ultimately lead to increased revenue and reduced staff turnover.

American healthcare has undergone significant changes after the pandemic. To recover it is important to invest our time and money towards initiatives which will create a sustainable system that optimizes public health and preventative care for all people. Our system today is not well-prepared to serve an aging, growing population, and creative, evidence-based solutions are needed to reduce costs, prevent shortages, and ensure that quality care is accessible to all.

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Southeast Asias Most Gay-Friendly Country Still Has No Law Against LGBT Discrimination

At first glance, the deeply Catholic Philippines can seem surprisingly LGBT-friendly. In a nation of 110 million people, more than 110,000 showed up last week to Quezon City’s Pride festival, making it by far the largest LGBT congregation in Southeast Asia. The country also ranks highest in the region for LGBT social acceptance—according to a 2021 global index—and it’s made significant strides over the years toward greater inclusivity and equality.
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And yet, for more than two decades, a bill that would criminalize discrimination based on one’s sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or sex characteristics (SOGIESC) has languished in the Philippines’ Congress. Year after year, it’s practically become an annual tradition for legislation on the matter to be reintroduced and rejected, leaving LGBT people in many parts of the country with no legal recourse when they’re discriminated against.

Read More: A Year After Singapore Decriminalized Gay Sex, Its LGBT Community Turns Attention to Family

While many cities across the country have already instituted local ordinances to make SOGIESC-based discrimination illegal, Irish Inoceto, a Filipino LGBT activist and former employee of the Philippine Supreme Court, tells TIME that they have “no teeth at all” and that she has seen firsthand just how overdue and glaringly necessary such a nationwide law is.

Ezra Acayan—Getty ImagesCommuters look on from a bus at activists taking part in a protest to kick off Pride month in Quezon City on June 2.

Last October, Inoceto received a message on Facebook from an 11th grader just weeks before students were to be required back in classrooms after two years of COVID-prompted remote learning. The student, a transgender woman in Iloilo City, some 280 miles southeast of Manila, had met Inoceto through one of the routine LGBT rights seminars Inoceto facilitated across Iloilo City, where she used to be based. The student, who had attended some classes in person during a hybrid-remote period, told Inoceto that the school principal summoned her personally to say that men should not wear bras; she also said a school security officer policed her uniform. Meanwhile, another student at the same school who also identifies as a transgender woman similarly reached out to Inoceto to tell her that the principal rounded up all the students in her grade and declared that bakla (gay men) with long hair must cut it or be barred from school.

“The length of my hair is not the basis for my schooling,” the latter student, who is now 19 and requested anonymity for fear of further discrimination, tells TIME.

The situation prompted Inoceto to write to the school on both students’ behalfs. She cited Iloilo City’s own anti-discrimination ordinance that passed in 2018, but she says her letter was ignored. Only after visiting the principal in person did Inoceto ultimately prevail in getting the school to back down on its attempts to curb both students’ gender expression. Any relief for Inoceto, however, was short-lived. The ordeal thrust her into the national spotlight and set in motion a saga that would ultimately force her to flee the country, where she continues to advocate for the national anti-discrimination bill to be passed.

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Inoceto, who is now 46 years old, has spent half her life watching Philippine legislators fail to create a national anti-discrimination law for the LGBT community. Legislative records show the first version of what would later come to be known as the SOGIE Equality Bill was filed in the Philippine House of Representatives on Jan. 26, 2000. Successive Congresses have seen the bill progress through the legislative process to varying degrees, only to meet the same fate: at best, the entire lower chamber might approve it, only for the upper chamber—the Philippine Senate—to let it stall in deliberations.

The most recent version of the bill in the Senate would outlaw SOGIESC-based discriminatory practices like refusing admission to or expelling a person from schools, or imposing harsher than normal disciplinary sanctions on students. If passed, violators may pay a fine as high as 250,000 Philippine pesos ($4,535) or be jailed for as long as six years.

But the bill faces steep political resistance, particularly from Christian fundamentalists who, despite constituting a minority of the population compared to the Philippine’s overwhelming Catholic majority, represent a potent political force in the country: megachurches have galvanized fiercely loyal followings and fostered political power through electoral endorsements and the fielding of their own candidates.

Read More: In the Philippines, You Can Be Both Openly LGBT and Proudly Catholic. But It’s Not Easy

Opponents of the SOGIE Equality Bill have been accused of promulgating disinformation online as well as in the halls of Congress to obstruct its passage.

Two of the most vocal figures in the legislative efforts to block the bill are father and son duo Eddie and Joel Villanueva—a representative and senator, respectively. The elder Villanueva, who is also the founder of the Jesus is Lord megachurch, has describe the bill as “imported,” saying it doesn’t represent Filipino values, while the younger Villanueva has accused the bill of being a precursor to “same-sex marriage.”

Reyna Valmores, chair of the Philippine LGBT rights group Bahaghari, has attended deliberations of the bill in the Philippine House as a resource person. She tells TIME the hearings can often feel like a “circus” of disinformation. “We have elected officials talking about how the SOGIE Equality Bill is going to legalize bestiality, is going to legalize having sex robots, and some other such nonsense.”

Jam Sta Rosa—AFP/Getty ImagesMembers and supporters of the LGBT community take part in the Metro Manila Pride March in Pasay, June 25, 2022.

“It’s a matter of debates in Congress,” Valmores says. “But for many people, it’s a matter of survival.”

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Soon after helping the two students in Iloilo City, Inoceto began to be targeted at a national scale—highlighting some of the extreme measures taken by prominent opponents of LGBT advocacy in the country.

Her name appeared in broadcasts from the Sonshine Media Network International, a television station owned by Apollo Quiboloy—a Philippine megachurch leader who is on the FBI’s most-wanted list for charges of sex trafficking women and children. Two anchors of a show on the network, Lorraine Badoy and Jeffrey “Ka Eric” Celiz, claimed that Inoceto was a member of the local communist insurgency group and has been using LGBT issues—such as her opposition to the gendered haircut policy—to recruit students from the Iloilo school. (TIME spoke to multiple students who denied that they had been recruited by Inoceto in any way.)

The sudden attention was confusing and frightening: “I’m an activist, but I’m not a big-time activist,” Inoceto tells TIME. “I work after hours and on weekends on my advocacy. So I was like, ‘Why me? And why issues on trans women students?’”

Ezra Acayan—Getty ImagesPeople protest a pardon granted to a U.S. marine who was convicted in 2014 of killing a Filipino transgender woman, in Quezon City, Sept. 8, 2020.

Red-tagging—a McCarthyism-like tactic of falsely labeling people as communists historically used in the Philippines to silence critics of the government, which has sometimes even led to victims being killed—has more and more been used against LGBT advocates in recent years. (Valmores from Bahaghari has also been red-tagged.)

Read More: You’ve Probably Heard of the Red Scare, Here’s the History You Didn’t Learn About the Anti-Gay ‘Lavender Scare’

After the broadcast, the country’s Commission on Human Rights issued a statement expressing concern over the anchors’ remarks, adding that the narrative they used “only serves to perpetuate the already disadvantageous plight of the LGBT who frequently face stigma, discrimination, and gender-based violence in our society.”

But that wasn’t the end of it. Inoceto saw her face posted across tarpaulins in the city, and her identity spread on social media. She even says her mother was visited by people who claimed to be police officers, asking her to stop her LGBT activism.

Concerned over the risks to her and her family’s safety, Inoceto says she applied for political asylum in France, where she is currently staying. She’s convinced that if the SOGIE Equality Bill had already been passed, she would have been protected from her harassment. “Right out the bat I was discriminated [against] because I was working towards inclusion,” she says.

Still, despite all the obstacles and dangerous disinformation wielded against the LGBT movement, Inoceto remains hopeful that the anti-discrimination bill in the Philippines will eventually pass—but not without sustained pressure put on the groups that are standing in its way. “Rights are fought for and won after so much struggle after all,” she says. “We just need to be stronger. In the meantime, we keep fighting the good fight.”

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Ukraines Zelensky Meets With Greta Thunberg to Discuss the Wars Effect on Ecology

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met Thursday with Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg and prominent European figures who are forming a working group to address ecological damage from the 16-month-old Russian invasion.

The meeting in the Ukrainian capital came as fighting continued around the country.

The governor of the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said two people were killed in the region’s capital in a Russian strike that hit residences, a medical facility and a school where residents were lined up to receive humanitarian aid. Another person was killed in a morning strike on the village of Bilzoerka, the regional prosecutor’s office said.
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The presidential office said Thursday morning that at least eight civilians died in Russian attacks during the previous 24 hours.

Read More: Inside Zelensky’s World

Zelensky also met former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence who visited Kyiv. Pence, an advocate of U.S. support to Ukraine, is running for the 2024 Republican nomination for president.

“We appreciate that both major U.S. parties, the Republican and Democratic, remain united in their support for Ukraine. And, of course, we feel the strong support of the people of the United States,” Zelensky told Pence, according to the presidential website.

The working group on the environment includes Thunberg, former Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Margot Wallström, European Parliament Vice President Heidi Hautala, and former Irish President Mary Robinson.

Zelensky said forming the group is “a very important signal of supporting Ukraine. It’s really important, we need your professional help.”

Read More: Greta Thunberg: Saving the Climate Means Changing How We Live

Thunberg said Russian forces “are deliberately targeting the environment and people’s livelihoods and homes. And therefore also destroying lives. Because this is after all a matter of people.”

The objectives of the working group are evaluating the environmental damage resulting from the war, formulating mechanisms to hold Russia accountable, and undertaking efforts to restore Ukraine’s ecology.

In Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill met with Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the Vatican envoy for seeking peace between Russia and Ukraine.

Kirill, a supporter of the war, said “It is very important that the Christian communities of East and West take part in the process of reconciliation,” according to video circulated by the Russian church.

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Travis Scott Not Criminally Charged Over Astroworld Crowd Crush

HOUSTON — A Texas grand jury declined to indict rap superstar Travis Scott in a criminal investigation of a deadly crowd surge at the 2021 Astroworld festival, where some spectators were packed so tightly they could not move their arms or even breathe, his attorney and prosecutors said Thursday.

Lawyer Kent Schaffer confirmed that the Harris County grand jury had met and decided not to indict his client on any criminal charges stemming from the concert.

“He never encouraged people to do anything that resulted in other people being hurt,” Schaffer said, adding that the decision is “a great relief.”
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Read More: Why Crowd Crushes Are So Deadly—And How to Survive Them

Circumstances of the deaths limited what charges prosecutors were able to present before the grand jury, eliminating potential counts such as murder, manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, said Alycia Harvey, an assistant district attorney with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.

That left prosecutors to focus on possible counts of endangering a child in connection with the deaths of the two youngest concertgoers, ages 9 and 14, she added.

“”The grand jury … found that no crime did occur, that no single individual was criminally responsible,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said.

The Nov. 5, 2021, crowd surge in Houston killed 10 young festivalgoers who ranged in age from 9 to 27. The official cause of death was compression asphyxia, which an expert likened to being crushed by a car.

Roughly 300 people were injured and treated at the scene, and 25 were taken to hospitals.

Houston police and federal officials have been investigating whether Scott, concert promoter Live Nation and others had sufficient safety measures in place.

During a news conference Thursday afternoon after the grand jury’s decision, police presented various details from their investigation including a timeline of events during Scott’s performance, the location at the concert site where the deaths occurred and video showing areas where crowds of people collapsed on each other.

But Police Chief Troy Finner declined to say what the overall conclusion of his agency’s investigation was or whether police should have stopped the concert sooner. Finner said police plan to make the more than 1,000-page report in the case public so people can read all the information investigators reviewed.

“The chief of police is not going to get up here and point fingers at anybody. I respect the grand jury’s decision. I simply want people to read (the offense report), read the entire investigation and everybody will see, very, very complicated,” Finner said.

Schaffer said he feels sympathy for those who were killed at the festival and their families.

“But Travis is not responsible,” Schaffer said. “Bringing criminal charges against him will not ease their pain.”

The grand jury declined to indict five other people, including festival manager Brent Silberstein. An attorney for Silberstein did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

More than 500 lawsuits were filed over the deaths and injuries at the concert, including many against Live Nation and Scott. Some have since been settled.

Kevin Haynes, a Houston attorney whose firm is representing hundreds of people injured at the concert, said he was disappointed by the grand jury’s decision but the civil cases will continue “to ensure responsible parties are held accountable in the ongoing pursuit of justice.”

About 50,000 people attended the festival.

A 56-page event operations plan for the event had detailed protocols for various dangerous scenarios including a shooting, bomb or terrorist threats and severe weather. But it did not include information on what to do in the event of a crowd surge.

In November, a task force unveiled a new agreement that local officials, public safety agencies and promoters said will clearly outline the responsibilities of all parties involved in such events to ensure they are safe.

Finner said Thursday that elevated platforms are now mandatory at such shows and they will be staffed by Houston police, firefighters and others who will all have authority to halt an event if they see problems.

Similar crushes have happened all over the world, from a soccer stadium in England to the hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia to Halloween festivities in the South Korean capital. Most people who who die in crowd surges suffocate.

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How Senate Democrats Hope to Force the Supreme Court to Adopt an Ethics Code

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin has been calling on the Supreme Court to change its ethics standards for almost a decade. Next month, he might finally get his chance to make it a reality.

In an interview with TIME, the Illinois Democrat shared the contours of a bill he expects his committee to vote on after the July 4 recess aimed at forcing the Supreme Court to establish for the first time an ethics code for the justices and clear rules dictating when justices must recuse themselves from cases. The proposed legislation is the latest effort by lawmakers to pressure the court to increase transparency and better police itself in the wake of revelations that justices had not disclosed extravagant gifts, travel and property deals.
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“What I’m really setting out to do is to restore the reputation of the court,” Durbin tells TIME. “If the court is going to maintain credibility and integrity, they have to address this issue now.” A recent poll from Quinnipiac shows that the Supreme Court’s approval rating sits at an all-time low of 29%, and some legal experts suspect that has less to do with its blockbuster decisions and more to do with scandals that are denting the public’s faith in the institution’s integrity.

The move to vote on the ethics package, Durbin says, was prompted by recent reporting by ProPublica about Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. The news outlet reported last week that Alito took an expensive fishing trip with prominent GOP donor Paul Singer in 2008, but never reported the fishing trip on his annual disclosure form nor recused himself from cases before the court that involved Singer’s business. Under court policy, judges are prohibited from accepting gifts from anyone with business before the court. Alito responded in an op-ed that he wasn’t aware that Singer was connected to the cases when the cases went before the court. “It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially,” the justice wrote.

Another ProPublica investigation from earlier this year revealed that Thomas accepted luxury trips around the globe from billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow without disclosing them. Thomas has also drawn scrutiny for selling a series of properties to Crow, including the home of his mother in a deal worth more than $100,000, and having Crow pay private boarding school tuition for Thomas’ grandnephew.

The investigations, Democrats say, underlined how few disclosure requirements are in place and how compliance is often left to the justices themselves. “There’s a grave ethics problem at the Supreme Court and pretty much everybody except the justices knows it,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has been probing the Supreme Court’s ethics issues, tells TIME.

Although a final bill is yet to be drafted, Durbin says there are three subject areas that would be “definitely included” in the legislative text his committee plans to vote on. Those measures include a code of ethics, increased disclosure requirements, and clear rules dictating when justices must recuse themselves from cases. The goal with the legislation, he says, is to apply the same standards to the Supreme Court that govern lower courts.

Republicans have shown little interest in supporting any such legislation, meaning the Judiciary Committee’s bill likely lacks the votes to pass Congress. Durbin may even struggle to find the votes to get it out of the Senate, where Democrats hold narrow control. Nonetheless, it could still shape the debate over the court’s integrity in the next election cycle.

“I think all the Democrats will be for it. I suspect all the Republicans will be against it,” Whitehouse says. “And I think in large part that’s a testament to the politicization of the court.”

Read more: Supreme Court Rules Against Race-Based Affirmative Action

Several Senators have already introduced their own ethics reform measures that they hope will be incorporated into the final text. Whitehouse, who chairs a subcommittee with jurisdiction over the federal judiciary, has pushed legislation that would give the justices 180 days to create a code of conduct, increase disclosure requirements and allow complaints to be filed against justices. A separate bipartisan bill by Sens. Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats, and Lisa Murkowski, a centrist-Republican from Alaska, would force the Supreme Court to establish its own ethics code and require it to appoint an official to examine potential conflicts and public complaints. Legislation introduced by Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, would require the Judicial Conference, the administrative body that oversees the federal bench, to issue an ethics code that would apply to the court.

Under Whitehouse’s bill, justices found guilty of violating the code of ethics would not be subject to sanctions or suspensions from the federal bench, though civil fines and penalties may be imposed in some cases under existing law. “I think pushing beyond that is a challenge we don’t need to face,” Whitehouse says, noting that his bill would give the chief judges of the Circuit Courts of Appeal authority to make the final determination on ethics violations.

Durbin declined to share which specific provisions will be included in the final bill, but noted that he plans to put the issue before the full committee to decide. He predicted that Congress will be forced to act if Chief Justice John Roberts does not address the issue on his own.

During our interview, Whitehouse acknowledged that congressional passage of his bill is an almost impossible task given the narrow Republican majority in the House. But he hopes that by raising the issue of Supreme Court ethics, it at least educates the public and “sends a signal” to the Judicial Conference to “look more broadly at the concerns of the court.”

For years, Republicans have argued that the push to impose an ethics code is a politically motivated attempt to undermine the legitimacy of a conservative-leaning court. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said last week that he doesn’t think Congress has the constitutional power to tell the Supreme Court how to handle ethics issues. “The Supreme Court, in my view, can’t be dictated to by Congress. I think the Chief Justice can address these issues, Congress should stay out of it,” McConnell told reporters. “I have total confidence in Chief Justice John Roberts.”

But many legal experts have argued that an ethics code for Supreme Court justices is long overdue. Charles Geyh, a law professor at Indiana University who focuses on judicial conduct and ethics, notes every state or federal court has subjected itself voluntarily to a code of conduct except the Supreme Court.

“The fact that we’ve got five justices on the Supreme Court right now who have been the subject of ethical questions… whatever they say they’re doing, it’s not working,” Geyh says. “Supreme Court justices have not been thinking deeply or seriously enough about the ethical responsibilities that normal judges think about thanks to having a code.”

Kyle Herrig, president of the watchdog organization Accountable.US, says that the ethics concerns at the Supreme Court highlight a recurring problem that has damaged the court’s reputation among the public. “It’s no surprise that these scandals have caused public trust in the Court to hit an all-time low,” he says. “While every single other federal judge is required to avoid behavior that so much as looks improper, our Supreme Court justices are taking lavish vacations with billionaires and failing to recuse themselves from cases where they have cozy relationships with involved parties.”

Roberts has so far resisted efforts by Congress to force changes to the high court he oversees, and declined a request to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee this year to discuss the matter in detail. He acknowledged the ethics controversy at an event in Washington last month: “I want to assure people that I’m committed to making certain that we as a court adhere to the highest standards of conduct. We are continuing to look at things we can do to give practical effect to that commitment.”

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Scientists Hear Ripples in the Fabric of Our Universe Something Einstein Predicted

NEW YORK — Scientists have observed for the first time the faint ripples caused by the motion of black holes that are gently stretching and squeezing everything in the universe.

They reported Wednesday that they were able to “hear” what are called low-frequency gravitational waves — changes in the fabric of the universe that are created by huge objects moving around and colliding in space.

“It’s really the first time that we have evidence of just this large-scale motion of everything in the universe,” said Maura McLaughlin, co-director of NANOGrav, the research collaboration that published the results in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Einstein predicted that when really heavy objects move through spacetime — the fabric of our universe — they create ripples that spread through that fabric. Scientists sometimes liken these ripples to the background music of the universe.

In 2015, scientists used an experiment called LIGO to detect gravitational waves for the first time and showed Einstein was right. But so far, those methods have only been able to catch waves at high frequencies, explained NANOGrav member Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at Yale University.

Those quick “chirps” come from specific moments when relatively small black holes and dead stars crash into each other, Mingarelli said.

Read more: A Brief History of the Search for Gravitational Waves

In the latest research, scientists were searching for waves at much lower frequencies. These slow ripples can take years or even decades to cycle up and down, and probably come from some of the biggest objects in our universe: supermassive black holes billions of times the mass of our sun.

Galaxies across the universe are constantly colliding and merging together. As this happens, scientists believe the enormous black holes at the centers of these galaxies also come together and get locked into a dance before they finally collapse into each other, explained Szabolcs Marka, an astrophysicist at Columbia University who was not involved with the research.

The black holes send off gravitational waves as they circle around in these pairings, known as binaries.

“Supermassive black hole binaries, slowly and calmly orbiting each other, are the tenors and bass of the cosmic opera,” Marka said.

No instruments on Earth could capture the ripples from these giants. So “we had to build a detector that was roughly the size of the galaxy,” said NANOGrav researcher Michael Lam of the SETI Institute.

The results released this week included 15 years of data from NANOGrav, which has been using telescopes across North America to search for the waves. Other teams of gravitational wave hunters around the world also published studies, including in Europe, India, China and Australia.

The scientists pointed telescopes at dead stars called pulsars, which send out flashes of radio waves as they spin around in space like lighthouses.

These bursts are so regular that scientists know exactly when the radio waves are supposed to arrive on our planet — “like a perfectly regular clock ticking away far out in space,” said NANOGrav member Sarah Vigeland, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. But as gravitational waves warp the fabric of spacetime, they actually change the distance between Earth and these pulsars, throwing off that steady beat.

By analyzing tiny changes in the ticking rate across different pulsars — with some pulses coming slightly early and others coming late — scientists could tell that gravitational waves were passing through.

The NANOGrav team monitored 68 pulsars across the sky using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico and the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Other teams found similar evidence from dozens of other pulsars, monitored with telescopes across the globe.

So far, this method hasn’t been able to trace where exactly these low-frequency waves are coming from, said Marc Kamionkowski, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved with the research.

Instead, it’s revealing the constant hum that is all around us — like when you’re standing in the middle of a party, “you’ll hear all of these people talking, but you won’t hear anything in particular,” Kamionkowski said.

The background noise they found is “louder” than some scientists expected, Mingarelli said. This could mean that there are more, or bigger, black hole mergers happening out in space than we thought — or point to other sources of gravitational waves that could challenge our understanding of the universe.

Researchers hope that continuing to study this kind of gravitational waves can help us learn more about the biggest objects in our universe. It could open new doors to “cosmic archaeology” that can track the history of black holes and galaxies merging all around us, Marka said.

“We’re starting to open up this new window on the universe,” Vigeland said.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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France to Deploy 40000 Police Officers Amid Violent Protests Following Deadly Police Shooting

NANTERRE, France — A French police officer who shot and killed a 17-year-old driver will be investigated for voluntary homicide, following two days of fires and violent protests that injured scores of officers, officials said Thursday.

Some 40,000 police officers will be deployed overnight to quell violence that engulfed cities and towns in the wake of the shooting.

The killing of 17-year-old Nahel during a traffic check Tuesday, captured on video, shocked the country and stirred up long-simmering tensions between young people and police in housing projects and other disadvantaged neighborhoods around France.

Protesters set cars and public buildings ablaze in Paris suburbs and unrest spread to some other French cities and towns.
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“The professionals of disorder must go home,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said. “There will be a lot more police and gendarmes present tonight.”

Darmanin said 170 officers had been injured in the unrest but none of the injuries were life-threatening.

Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache said that he had requested that the officer be held in custody. That decision is to be made by another magistrate.

Based on an initial investigation, Prache said, he concluded that “the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met.”

Three persons were in the car when police tried to stop it Tuesday, the prosecutor said. Nahel managed to avoid a traffic stop by running a red light. He was later got stuck in a traffic jam.

Both officers involved said they drew their guns to prevent him from starting the car again.

The officer who fired a single shot said he wanted to prevent the car from leaving and because he feared someone may be hit by the car, including himself or his colleague, according to Prache.

Both officers said they felt “threatened” by seeing the car drive off, he added.

Two magistrates have been named to lead the investigation, Prache said. Under the French legal system, which differs from the U.S. and British systems, magistrates are often assigned to lead investigations.

In a separate case, a police officer who fatally shot a 19-year-old Guinean man in western France earlier this month was handed preliminary charges of voluntary homicide, according to a statement by the local prosecutor on Wednesday. The man was fatally shot by an officer as he allegedly tried to escape a traffic stop. The investigation is still ongoing.

Clashes first erupted Tuesday night in and around the Paris suburb of Nanterre, where Nahel was killed, and the government deployed 2,000 police to maintain order Wednesday. But violence resumed after dusk.

Nahel’s surname has not been released by authorities or by his family. In earlier statements, lawyers for the family spelled the name Nael.

Police and firefighters struggled to contain protesters and extinguish numerous blazes through the night that damaged schools, police stations and town halls or other public buildings, according to a spokesperson for the national police. The national police on Thursday reported fires or skirmishes in multiple cities overnight, from Toulouse in the south to Lille in the north, though the nexus of tensions was Nanterre and other Paris suburbs.

Police arrested 150 people around the country, more than half of them in the Paris region, the spokesperson said. She was not authorized to be publicly named according to police rules.

The number of injured was not immediately released.

Scenes of violence in France’s suburban areas echo 2005, when the deaths of 15-year-old Bouna Traoré and 17-year-old Zyed Benna led to three weeks of nationwide riots, exposing anger and resentment in neglected, crime-ridden suburban housing projects.

The two boys entered a power substation to hide from police in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, and were electrocuted.

French President Emmanuel Macron held an emergency security meeting Thursday about the violence.

“These acts are totally unjustifiable,” Macron said at the beginning of the meeting, which aimed at securing hot spots and planning for the coming days “so full peace can return.”

Macron also said it was time for “remembrance and respect” as Nahel’s mother called for a silent march Thursday in his honor on the square where he was killed.

Multiple vehicles were set ablaze in Nanterre and protesters shot fireworks and threw stones at police, who fired repeated volleys of tear gas. Flames shot out of three stories of a building, and a blaze was reported at an electrical plant. Fire damaged the town hall of the Paris suburb of L’Ile-Saint-Denis, not far from France’s national stadium and the headquarters of the Paris 2024 Olympics.

The police officer accused of the killing is in custody on suspicion of manslaughter and could face preliminary charges as soon as Thursday, according to the Nanterre prosecutor’s office.

French activists renewed calls to tackle what they see as systemic police abuse, particularly in neighborhoods like the one where Nahel lived, where many residents struggle with poverty and racial or class discrimination. Government officials condemned the killing and sought to distance themselves from the police officer’s actions.

Macron called the killing “inexplicable and inexcusable” and called for calm. “Nothing justifies the death of a young person,” he told reporters in Marseille on Wednesday.

Videos of the shooting shared online show two police officers leaning into the driver-side window of a yellow car before the vehicle pulls away as one officer fires into the window. The videos show the car later crashed into a post nearby.

The driver died at the scene, the prosecutor’s office said.

Bouquets of orange and yellow roses now mark the site of the shooting, on Nanterre’s Nelson Mandela Square.

Speaking to Parliament, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said, “the shocking images broadcast yesterday show an intervention that appears clearly not to comply with the rules of engagement of our police forces.”

Deadly use of firearms is less common in France than in the United States, though several people have died or sustained injuries at the hands of French police in recent years, prompting demands for more accountability. France also saw protests against racial profiling and other injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by police in Minnesota.

The most recent government statistics available show that 17 people were killed after police and gendarmerie officers shot at them in 2021.

Asked about police abuses, Macron said justice should be allowed to run its course.

A lawyer for Nahel’s family, Yassine Bouzrou, told The Associated Press they want the police officer prosecuted for murder instead of manslaughter.

French soccer star Kylian Mbappe, who grew up in the Paris suburb of Bondy, was among many shocked by what happened.

“I hurt for my France,” he tweeted.

— Corbet reported from Paris. Oleg Cetinic and Christophe Ena in Nanterre, and Angela Charlton in Paris, contributed.

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Madonna Postpones Upcoming Celebration Tour Due to Serious Bacterial Infection

LOS ANGELES — Madonna has postponed her career-spanning Celebration tour due to what her manager called a “serious bacterial infection.”

Manager Guy Oseary wrote on Instagram Wednesday that the singer had spent several days in an intensive care unit after becoming ill on Saturday. He said the 64-year-old singer is expected to make a full recovery.

The tour was set to kick off in Vancouver on July 15.

“Her health is improving, however she is still under medical care,” Oseary wrote.

Live Nation confirmed the tour postponement, citing Oseary’s post.

The Celebration tour is scheduled to make stops in Detroit, Chicago, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta and Boston, among other cities, and its first leg was slated to end on Oct. 7 in Las Vegas. Oseary said details about rescheduled dates would be shared soon.

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Whitney Wolfe Herd Wants Technology to Cure Loneliness

I first interviewed Whitney Wolfe Herd in 2015, back when she was just Whitney Wolfe, a 25 year old who had recently started a little company called Bumble. For those of you who aren’t on dating apps, Bumble lets you swipe left or right on a picture of a potential match—except in the beginning, only women could make the first move. Since its founding, Bumble has expanded from a dating platform into a way to find everyone from friends to mentors, with strict rules to prevent harassment. Wolfe Herd once described it to me as “Facebook, but for people who don’t know each other yet.”
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Read More: How Whitney Wolfe Hurd Turned a Vision of a Better Internet Into a Billion-Dollar Brand

In 2021, Wolfe Herd became the youngest woman ever to take a company public. And she’s now one of the only women running a major tech company that she founded herself. The tech world is full of stories of male founders who seem indifferent to the consequences of what happens on their platforms. But Wolfe Herd seems to want to take real responsibility for how people behave on her app. And that has big implications for how we all treat each other—online and off.

We talked about the relationship between tech and loneliness, the demise of the so-called girl boss, plus: is she thinking about a future in politics?

On how tech contributes to the loneliness epidemic:

Community and connection are the foundation of our existence, and loneliness is killing us. So many of these other problems that we’re seeing throughout our society is a huge derivative of loneliness and disconnection… And it is lonely being in my business position. It is. I don’t have a lot of people to call. I don’t have a lot of people to lean on, and not a lot of people can relate to the day-to-day swings. Um, so that feels super lonely. Um, I feel lonely a lot and I think it’s actually good to feel lonely for me because I can empathize with our customer….

Go look at how the majority of these social products are incentivized. How do they make money? How do we get you to click on stuff? … If they need to make money through clicks, through time in app, well then something’s gotta give. And the thing that unfortunately has had to give is health, wellness, sanity, ethics.

We have taken a different approach. Our business is only successful if we lose a customer. Our value is in getting you off of our app and meeting in real life. So if technology created loneliness, how can technology end it?

On the decline of the girl bosses who founded companies in the 2010s:

It makes my soul, like, shatter. When we say I’m the last one standing of this group of women that worked their entire twenties or thirties, whatever it was, and broke through barriers that had never been broken through before, they had raised capital that was unheard of. And they had hired and scaled teams that was history making, yet look what we did to them. Look what we did to them. They’re gone.

I’m not saying they’re all perfect. Maybe some of them did make mistakes, but guess what? People make mistakes. Men survive and women don’t.

It makes me so sad that every woman that has made it somewhere, it’s not a happy ending. It’s like their company was taken away. They got pushed out. They got kicked out, and did some of them deserve it? I mean, people doing bad things deserve consequences, man, woman or otherwise. Right? But I think a lot of them were really treated unfairly. I think they were up against impossible standards, if that makes sense. And the forgiveness threshold was incredibly different for them than it was for a lot of our male counterparts…

So I’m certainly not saying like, oh, we should forgive someone because they’re a woman. But I don’t think we should be proud that there’s a bunch of young women out there saying, quote unquote, “the girl boss era’s dead, we don’t wanna start companies.”

On her response to the Dobbs decision, as an Austin-based CEO:

I think it’s horrifying. So horrifying that I literally was like, do I need to run for governor of this state to go fix this? I can’t, I mean, there’s no way… I can barely function. First of all, no one would vote for me. But I think that it is so horrifying that I just want to do something to fix it. I want to do something to fix it, and I want to support women that are struggling with the near term circumstances of this.

I haven’t given it actual real thought. I just, I’m the type of person that I want to fix something. Look what my career has been made of: problem, solution, problem, solution. And if it’s not me, then who’s gonna go do it? And that’s the way I’ve always looked at it. It’s like, unless there’s someone else I can point to that’s doing it… I think there’s a lot of people that are very intelligent and very experienced that should run before I do. Much better suited folks on a series of fronts. I don’t have enough experience in that category, but candidly, like if no one else does it, I’m gonna do it because someone needs to go and change this. We have to. We certainly cannot just sit and accept this, right?

If someone told me, “You can win and you can get in there and you can fix this very horrible situation for women,” would I do it? Yes. But I probably have bigger impact just running my business.

These excerpts have been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Heres How Bad a Nuclear War Would Actually Be

We know that an all-out U.S.-Russia nuclear war would be bad. But how bad, exactly? How do your chances of surviving the explosions, radiation, and nuclear winter depend on where you live? The past year’s unprecedented nuclear saber-rattling and last weekend’s chaos in Russia has made this question timely. To help answer it, I’ve worked with an amazing interdisciplinary group of scientists (see end credits) to produce the most scientifically realistic simulation of a nuclear war using only unclassified data, and visualize it as a video. It combines detailed modeling of nuclear targeting, missile trajectories, blasts and the electromagnetic pulse, and of how black carbon smoke is produced, lofted and spread across the globe, altering the climate and causing mass starvation.
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As the video illustrates, it doesn’t matter much who starts the war: when one side launches nuclear missiles, the other side detects them and fires back before impact. Ballistic missiles from U.S. submarines west of Norway start striking Russia after about 10 minutes, and Russian ones from north of Canada start hitting the U.S. a few minutes later. The very first strikes fry electronics and power grids by creating an electro-magnetic pulse of tens of thousands of volts per meter. The next strikes target command-and-control centers and nuclear launch facilities. Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles take about half an hour to fly from launch to target.

Major cities are targeted both because they contain military facilities and to stymie the enemy’s post-war recovery. Each impact creates a fireball about as hot as the core of the sun, followed by a radioactive mushroom cloud. These intense explosions vaporize people nearby and cause fires and blindness further away. The fireball expansion then causes a blast wave that damages buildings, crushing nearby ones. The U.K. and France have nuclear capabilities and are obliged by NATO’s Article 5 to defend the U.S. so, Russia hits them too. Firestorms engulf many cities, where storm-level winds fan the flames, igniting anything that can burn, melting glass and some metals and turning asphalt into flammable hot liquid.

Unfortunately, peer-reviewed research suggests that explosions, the electromagnetic pulse, and the radioactivity aren’t the worst part: a nuclear winter is caused by the black carbon smoke from the nuclear firestorms. The Hiroshima atomic bomb caused such a firestorm, but today’s hydrogen bombs are much more powerful. A large city like Moscow, with almost 50 times more people than Hiroshima, can create much more smoke, and a firestorm that sends plumes of black smoke up into the stratosphere, far above any rain clouds that would otherwise wash out the smoke. This black smoke gets heated by sunlight, lofting it like a hot air balloon for up to a decade. High-altitude jet streams are so fast that it takes only a few days for the smoke to spread across much of the northern hemisphere.

This makes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 20 degrees centigrade (about 40 degrees Fahrenheit), and other regions cooling almost twice as much. A recent scientific paper estimates that over 5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia, and China – because most black carbon smoke stays in the Northern hemisphere where it’s produced, and because temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes.

It’s important to note that huge uncertainties remain, so the actual humanitarian impact could be either better or worse – a reason to proceed with caution. A recently launched $4M open research program will hopefully help clarify public understanding and inform the global policy conversation, but much more work is needed, since most of the research on this topic is classified and focused on military rather than humanitarian impacts.

We obviously don’t know how many people will survive a nuclear war. But if it’s even remotely as bad as this study predicts, it has no winners, merely losers. It’s easy to feel powerless, but the good news is that there is something you can do to help: please help share this video! The fact that nuclear war is likely to start via gradual escalation, perhaps combined by accident or miscalculation, means that the more people know about nuclear war, the more likely we are to avoid having one.

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Why Some People in Thailand Become Monks After Committing Crimes

What was supposed to be an informative fire drill at a school in Thailand last week turned deadly when a fire extinguisher exploded, killing one student and injuring about 10 others at Bangkok’s Rachawinit School. While the accident has sparked concerns about the safety of fire extinguishers used in the classroom as others seek accountability for the student’s death, some at the heart of the tragedy are atoning in a characteristically Thai way: becoming monks for a little while.

At the 18-year-old boy’s funeral on Tuesday, four firefighters involved in the fire drill were seen sporting shaved heads and dressed in saffron robes, kneeling on the ground with their palms pressed together.
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The carbon dioxide canister had been sitting under the hot sun when it exploded and metal scraps struck the victim, police said. Three officials responsible for the fire drill are set to face charges of negligence, local media reported.

Enrolling into monkhood may seem like a novel way of making amends, but the practice has become commonplace in Thailand, especially among people who have caused harm in public ways. For Buddhists, becoming a monk is a maximal way to convey sincerity and apology. But some worry that these reflexive ordinations are increasingly being used as a cure-all to bad behavior, further tainting the reputation of Buddhism, which has already been in decline after years of scandals.

Read More: Meet the Legendary Warrior Monk Passing on the Secrets of Kung Fu and Buddhism

The ceremony on Tuesday, known as buat na fai, or “ordainment before the pyre,” was a way for the firefighters to show regret for the accident that killed the student in Bangkok. Two of the boy’s classmates also took part in the religious ceremony at the funeral.

While traditionally this ritual is reserved for blood relatives of the deceased, it is sometimes expanded to those who are not family members, Katewadee Kulabkaew, a scholar of Thai Buddhism, tells TIME. “In practice, Thai monasteries will let anyone to buat na fai for a few days, a week, or a few months, given that the deceased’s family is consensual,” she says.

There’s a low barrier to entering and leaving monkhood, and many in Thailand choose to get ordained as monks for a variety of reasons—but usually to “make merit,” a Buddhist practice of accumulating good karma.

“Traditional Buddhist teaching says that ordination is the greatest merit (which can be transferred to the dead in afterlife), but it cannot absolve one’s sins. As a result, funerary ordination is indeed an act of compensation rather than redemption,” says Katewadee. “In order to show the society that you are tremendously sorry, caring, or deeply grateful for the deceased, you do your best by making the greatest merit for them.”

When a young soccer team was successfully extricated from a Thai cave in 2018 after a rescue operation that gripped the world, the boys were ordained as novice monks and spent over a week living at a Buddhist temple, to fulfill a prayer that their families made in exchange for their safe return as well as to honor a volunteer diver who died while saving them.

“Their lives will change now,” a local official told reporters at the time. “This experience will help them to appreciate their parents and give them a taste of Dhamma.”

Somparn Promta, a lecturer of philosophy at Mahachulalongkorn University, tells TIME that it’s common practice for people to seek ordination as Buddhist monks for a limited time after causing harm to others, as a way to “show their moral responsibility” and “make merit for those who are harmed by them.”

“This kind of ordination usually takes a short time. Normally about seven days,” he says. “It would help the persons who harm others to feel good both with themselves and those who are harmed.”

In 2019, a wealthy businessman was ordained as a monk after making headlines for killing two people while drunk driving. He also agreed to pay 45 million baht ($1.26 million) in damages to the victims’ families.

But getting ordained doesn’t automatically come with public forgiveness. Last year, in another road accident that sparked national outrage, a young policeman hit and killed a woman while speeding on his motorcycle. Days after the crash, both he and his father entered monkhood to make merit for the victim, but the move did little to stop public anger from boiling over. The incident sparked heated discussions about the city’s road safety and reckless drivers. The 21-year-old cop was also pressured to exit monkhood after just three days, after the public raised concerns that he was not fit to be a monk.

“Many Thais are obsessed with the idea that merit-making can compensate for when they have erred, as if crimes and merit making are transactional,” a Bangkok Post columnist wrote days after the deadly road accident.

“This attitude does more harm than good to society, as it reinforces a notion that anyone—from individuals to government officials and politicians—can trade away their karmic debt through public displays of contrition yet continue to repeat those same illegal or immoral acts.”

In recent years, the reputation of monks has taken a hit in Buddhist-majority Thailand, where most men are required to live as a monk temporarily at some point in their lives. Some criminals are known to take refuge in monkhood as they lay low from the outside world. Meanwhile, reports of monks engaging in criminal activity—ranging from money laundering to drug trafficking and even murder—have further eroded public trust in the clergy.

But for this week, public sentiments appear to sympathize with the firefighters who have now become—at least temporarily—novice monks. On social media, their ordination was met with support and condolences, with many seeing the case as an unfortunate accident more than a tragedy caused by negligence.

“I would like to congratulate the four people who were ordained for the younger brother,” one Facebook user commented. “I wish [the victim] will rest in a better world.”

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House GOP Plans to Ramp Up Hunter Biden Inquiry After July Arraignment

A week after Hunter Biden reached a plea deal on misdemeanor tax charges, Republicans in Congress are making clear they are not done with the President’s son. Fresh off an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower alleging that Biden received special treatment from the Justice Department, House Republicans are planning a new chapter in their investigation, which could possibly stretch into 2024 as the presidential campaign ramps up.

According to sources familiar with the matter, House GOP leadership is waiting for Hunter Biden’s arraignment, scheduled for July 26, as it prepares for a multi-pronged investigatory effort spearheaded by three committees: the Judiciary Committee, the Oversight Committee, and the Ways and Means Committee.
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The panels are “pursuing a thorough investigation into this misconduct to deliver the transparency and accountability that the American people demand and deserve,” its three chairs—Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, James Comer of Kentucky, and Jason Smith of Missouri—said in a statement Wednesday.

The new phase of the inquiry stems from testimony provided last week to the Ways and Means Committee by Gary Shapley, an IRS official who supervised the agency’s role in the investigation. Asserting whistleblower protections, he claimed that Attorney General Merrick Garland prevented the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney overseeing the inquiry from bringing more charges against the President’s son. Both Garland and the prosecutor, David Weiss, have strenuously denied the allegations and have rebutted any accusations of bias. And the DOJ said when announcing the agreement, without elaboration, that the “investigation is ongoing.” Sources say that House Republicans are likely to call Weiss to testify on the matter in the coming months.

Shapley, a 14-year IRS employee, also told lawmakers the Justice Department denied requests from prosecutors to examine text messages in which Hunter Biden allegedly used his father as leverage to pressure a Chinese company to pay him. “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” Hunter Biden texted the CEO of a Chinese fund management company in 2017, according to testimony from Shapley. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden told reporters he wasn’t with his son during the exchange six years ago, when the elder Biden was no longer Vice President and not yet elected President.

Be that as it may, many Hill Republicans see the latest revelations as an opportunity to expand and accelerate an investigation that has been at the center of the conference’s agenda since assuming a slim majority in January but that has so far failed to deliver anything that incriminates the President. At the very least, they can hunt for evidence to determine whether Garland’s or Shapley’s account is true.

Read more: How Hunter Biden’s Scandals Compare to Those of Trump’s Family Members

Democrats argue that the latest iteration of the Hunter Biden probe is a cynical attempt to damage the President’s reputation going into his reelection bid. “This is just typical presidential year political theater and not serious oversight work,” a former Democratic congressional investigative counsel tells TIME, who requested anonymity because they still do work with the government. “The more media attention that a whistleblower seeks, in my experience, the less credible they’ve typically been.”

It’s an argument shared by other veterans of official Washington, including Ronald Weich, former assistant attorney general for legislative affairs and chief counsel to former Senators Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy. “I do not think this is an appropriate subject for congressional oversight, at least at this time,” he tells TIME.

Weich, now the dean of the University of Baltimore Law School, emphasizes that an IRS whistleblower could turn to the inspector general of either the Treasury Department or the Justice Department. “Running to Congress should not be the first avenue for a whistleblower,” he says. “And Congress should not be interfering in ongoing criminal investigations or prosecutions. I think the fact that he went to Congress suggests that this has more of a political motive.”

Another former high-level government official expressed skepticism over the complaints. “Whistleblowers frequently have agendas that explain their coming forward—sometimes the agendas are personal; in this day and age, they are increasingly political,” Michael Bromwich, a former federal prosecutor and Department of Justice Inspector General during the Clinton Administration, emails TIME. “Whistleblowers should not be dismissed out of hand, but their allegations also shouldn’t be treated as the gospel truth until fully vetted and tested.”

In the days since they released Shapley’s testimony, House Republicans have cited it as further material to pursue impeachment proceedings against Garland—an idea promoted by the likes of right-wing firebrands Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. On Monday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy signaled a willingness to consider the measure. “If the whistleblowers’ allegations are true,” he tweeted, “this will be a significant part of a larger impeachment inquiry into Merrick Garland’s weaponization of DOJ.”

But for Democrats, the forthcoming proceedings, however they may play out, are poised to amount to more of a stunt than a serious investigation into alleged wrongdoing. “Merrick Garland has a pretty long track record,” says the former congressional counsel. “I find it pretty implausible that he would stake his career on trying to protect Hunter Biden.”

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Smoke From Canadian Wildfires Leaves Detroit With Some of the Worst U.S. Air Quality

DETROIT — The Detroit area woke up Wednesday to some of the worst air quality in the United States as smoke from Canada’s wildfires settled over most of the Great Lakes region and unhealthy haze spread southward, as far as Missouri and Kentucky.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow.gov site showed Detroit in the “hazardous” range and warned that “everyone should stay indoors and reduce activity levels.”

Drifting smoke from the wildfires has lowered curtains of haze on broad swaths of the United States, pushing into southern Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, and moving into parts of West Virginia. The AirNow.gov site listed air quality Wednesday in Cleveland, Ohio, Indianapolis, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, Penn., as “very unhealthy.” A wider circle of unhealthy air spread into St. Louis, Mo., and Louisville, Ky.
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“Another round is going through western New York, western Pennsylvania later today,” National Weather Service meteorologist Byran Jackson said Wednesday. “And then that continues over the northern Mid-Atlantic. It will persist there into Thursday.”

“There’s particularly poor air quality … over southern Wisconsin, Illinois, central Indiana, and also another area over southeast Michigan, Detroit and northeast Ohio around Cleveland,” Jackson added. “This is particularly thick smoke.”

In Minnesota issued a record 23rd air quality alert for the year through late Wednesday night, as smoky skies obscured the skylines of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Michigan also issued an air quality alert, and Wisconsin put out an air quality advisory.

In Chicago, a visit to the Lincoln Park Zoo became a different sort of adventure. “Just driving into the zoo … you could just see around the buildings, kind of just haze,” visitor Shelly Woinowski said Tuesday.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson urged young people, older adults and residents with health issues to spend more time indoors while unsafe conditions continue, and pledged “swift action to ensure that vulnerable individuals have the resources they need to protect themselves and their families.”

Across Canada, 490 fires are burning, with 255 of them considered to be out of control.

The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre reported Monday that 76,129 square kilometers (29,393 square miles) of land including forests has burned across Canada since Jan. 1. That exceeds the previous record set in 1989 of 75,596 square kilometers (29,187 square miles), according to the National Forestry Database.

Some wet weather in Quebec gave firefighters a chance to get ahead of some of the flames, but there hasn’t been enough rain to extinguish the wildfires. Environment Canada meteorologist Simon Legault said he expects rain to stop falling by Wednesday morning in the regions most affected by forest fires. Many of the fires burning in Canada are in Quebec and Ontario, nearer to North America’s most populated areas than western wilderness areas.

Earlier this month, massive fires burning stretches of Canadian forestsblanketed the northeastern United States and the Great Lakes region with smoke, turning the air yellowish gray and prompting warnings for people to stay inside and keep windows closed.

The small particles in wildfire smoke can irritate the eyes, nose and throat, and can affect the heart and lungs, making it harder to breathe. Health officials say it’s important to limit outdoor activities as much as possible to avoid breathing in the particles.

U.S. President Joe Biden has noted that hundreds of American personnel have joined Canadians to fight the fires, which he has described as clear evidence of climate change.

The warming planet will produce hotter and longer heat waves, making for bigger, smokier fires, said Joel Thornton, professor and chair of the department of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.

“You can smell it bad,” said Priti Marwah, who was beginning a run along Chicago’s lakefront on Tuesday. “I run a hundred miles a week, so this is going to be dangerous today. You can feel it … just even parking right there and coming out, I can feel it in my lungs.”

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency said a cold front will bring cleaner air from the west across the Great Lakes region by early Thursday.

The coming respite meant little to Dan Daley Tuesday in St. Louis Park, Minnesota — he said “it’s kind of miserable some days because you can’t spend a lot of time outside.”

from TIME https://ift.tt/04yJ8xO